You need plenty of spare space on your system drive for this - it is a big download.

Also do not try do it with any external drives connected - particularly important with tablets, as I found to my cost. I completely forgot the micro SD card in its hidden slot in my Surface 3, and after nearly two hours preparing, downloading, preparing to install, and finally installing, the whole process ground to a halt at 40%.

To continue, I had to force a restart, at which point Windows kindly reverted to the previous settings, and I had to go through the entire procedure again.

I am very pleased with the results on my Surface 3, but then it was designed with Windows 10 in mind. It boots and shuts down in half the time it took before the upgrade. Also using the touch screen, things like moving tiles, or swiping to move through a series of photographs in the photos app is much smoother. Before the upgrade these gestures felt rather like having a rubber band between hand and tile or photo!

At this stage I have no intention to upgrade my editing machine or my laptop (also used for editing), but I may be pressured by my wife to upgrade her desktop.

I shall probably upgrade all three to W10, art some stage, and then use an image to revert to Windows 7, to ensure my free upgrade to W10. I believe the upgrade has to be performed before the first anniversary of the release of W10 to qualify for the free upgrade.

However, after installing the latest upgrade the Device Manager shows two issues that weren't there before, i.e. Surface pen "...device_power_failure" and one of two "IWD Bus Enumerator" cannot load (code 31). Of interest the Surface pen works properly and the batteries have been replaced several times. .

Also all of the other computers show an Unknown USB Device, which when disabled shows none of the USB devices not working.

These are minor to problems encountered on my main editing computer, i.e. clicking on the following - "notification", right clicking on Windows desktop icon and selecting any of the commands shown did not load them.

Worse still, upgrading to the latest NVIDIA driver must be avoided, as well don't even think of upgrading JAVA.

It took me two times rolling back the System Image, after making the same errors repeatedly before realized it is the latest Win 10 upgrade that is the problem.

“One of the ways we measure our progress with Windows 10 is looking at how people are using Windows,” explained Microsoft Senior Vice President Yusuf Mehdi. “Recently we reached another milestone – people have spent over 11 billion hours on Windows 10 in December alone, spending more time on Windows than ever before.”

That’s a crazy amount, but what is even crazier is the revelation that Microsoft is tracking exactly how long user are using Windows 10. Then things got ever weirder as Mehdi announced: “Here are a few fun facts on what people have been doing on Windows 10”. They are as follows:

Over 44.5 billion minutes spent in Microsoft Edge across Windows 10 devices in just the last month

Over 2.5 billion questions asked of Cortana since launch

Over 82 billion photos viewed within the Windows 10 Photo app

In 2015 gamers spent over 4 billion hours playing PC games on Windows 10

Gamers streamed over 6.6 million hours of Xbox One games to Windows 10 PCs

Yes, Microsoft admitted it not only logs its users time on Windows 10 but also their time using Microsoft Edge… and gaming… and streaming games… and counting your search queries… and every single time a user opens a photo.

Speaking to PC World, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Joe Belfiore explained that Windows 10 is constantly tracking how it operates and how you are using it and sending that information back to Microsoft by default. More importantly he also confirmed that, despite offering some options to turn elements of tracking off, core data collection simply cannot be stopped.

Still, whether or not you agree with Belfiore’s standpoint that this doesn’t invade user privacy, it does seem strange that it has taken Microsoft so long to come clean and admit core Windows 10 background data collection processes cannot be stopped. Instead it gave the impression that turning off all user accessible spying options in Windows 10 settings would provide owners with full privacy – that’s tantamount to spying.